“Over my most recent fights, I have come to the realization that at this point I no longer can [or] want to make fighting my first priority,” he wrote. “It’s hard to make a decision like this, but I feel it’s best for me to step away for now, and time will tell what the future will bring for me.”

At the time, Pellegrino was on the heels of two straight losses to fellow lightweights George Sotiropoulos and Gleison Tibau.

He wasn’t finding much success inside the cage, nor was he able to devote enough attention and energy to his life outside the cage.

Him and his wife, Melissa, were expecting their second child. He had teaching duties at his gym. He had business ventures to entertain.

With so much on his plate, he made the decision to step away from MMA.

Frankly, he just lost the itch to fight. But it certainly didn’t take long for him to get it back.
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“Sam Caplan, our VP of talent development, called me, and he said, ‘There is a slight chance that Kurt Pellegrino might be willing to come back and fight for this organization,'” CEO Bjorn Rebney said after Bellator 49. “We jumped all over it.”

After a flirtation period between the promotion and Pellegrino, it may have been the actual Bellator 59 logistics that sealed the deal.

New Jersey is where Pellegrino grew up. It’s where he still resides. It’s all he’s ever known. Pellegrino has fought in his home state in eight career bouts, including six of his first nine pro fights, while making his way up the ladder as a relative unknown.

“I have an opportunity to fight for Bellator in my backyard where I started this whole game,” Pellegrino said. “I started fighting in Atlantic City. I won two championship belts in Atlantic City.”

Not only will the fight take place in friendly territory, but it’ll come against a formidable challenge in Freire, who was a finalist in a recent Bellator lightweight tournament.

It’s precisely the kind of challenge that will require Pellegrino to dive headfirst back into the sport. And it’s something he’s now in a much better place to be able to tackle, even though it was just a short time ago when that was not the case.

“I started working out again real hard,” Pellegrino said. “The summer has been amazing. I fell in love again with the sport. I had some demons. I had to kind of just walk away and be with my family for once.”

A total of 26 fighters got their chance to shine on Saturday as part of UFC 190 at Rio de Janeiro’s HSBC Arena. Now that UFC 190 is in the books, it’s time to commence MMAjunkie’s “Three Stars” ceremony.

The man known for cranking submissions to the point of injury added eye-gouging to his repertoire. But is the controversy of Rousimar Palhares too essential to his bizarre, awful appeal for his employers to take any meaningful action against him?